It’s been a long time since a book left me this wrecked that I closed the last page and just sit, think about my own life. Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt by Ben Reeves did that to me.

Here, we meet Travis. Or, as this book reimagines him as Death, who works in the modern world with one job: sitting with people through their final hours. If I had to pick a book character to become, Travis would be near the top of my list. He’s stoic without being cold and never once judges the people he meets, no matter how messy their final moments get. There’s an openness to the world that feels strange coming from a character who’s seen everyone die, and that contrast is part of what makes him so charming. But here’s the contradiction. He tries so hard not to get attached to the people he escorts out of life, and yet he can’t help but feel everything anyway, turning over what love means and why people keep choosing to live despite knowing how it ends. Reading him wrestle with that made me realize I was doing the same thing as a reader, trying to stay detached from these characters and failing completely.

Now, let’s talk about the title. Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt sounds almost too peaceful for a book that deals so directly with death and loss, and I spent a good chunk of the story wondering how the author would earn that ending. I don’t want to spoil how it gets there, because the joy of this book is partly discovering it for yourself the way I did. What I can say is that the story makes a case, without ever being preachy about it, for the idea that grief is part of the road that leads to a beautiful life. Life is messy and doesn’t always tie up so neatly. Getting a glimpse of beautiful life through a happy ending, even a fictional one, plants a little bit of hope you can carry with you. And by the end, Travis aka Death himself falls in love with life, which might be the heart of this book: embracing hope and connection even when loss is guaranteed.

My Favorite Bits

• The human life is a cycle, she’s learnt. We start pathetic, we end pathetic. Perhaps, she thinks, we weren’t meant to last this long.

• There’s life in you yet. But she learnt long ago, there’s no life better than a life shared. To fully give it, and take it, until one isn’t complete without the other.

• They will be sad, because sad is what it is, and the sadness comes in many colours – the vibrant shock and disbelief in a few hours when she finds you, then a more muted colour for many years after that, and finally a subtle, more abstract kind of colour until I come and take them too.

• An event so epic and insignificant is not meant to be watched. It is destructive and it is creative. And it is happening now.

• I always thought life was a bit like a house. (..) People buy a house and they spend their whole lives trying to make it perfect. They decorate the rooms the way they want them. Make it a happy place to be. Make it somewhere they could die in. That’s what I used to think. (..) But life isn’t a house, is it? It’s more like a hotel. And there are good hotels and there are bad hotels, but it’s okay because you only stay in each one for a little bit. Maybe you’re staying in a nice room with a comfy bed and good food, but the next one could be horrible. Or maybe you’re in the horrible one, but you know the next one might be better. And you’re constantly moving, and things get better, and things get worse. But no matter what – it’s not a house. You can’t stay there forever.

• Here we are, doing small things, nothing really, just talking, watching television. And yet in the nothingness there is a life more real than any wedding or christening or birthday party. In these tiny moments, when the spectacle is stripped away, when there is no reason for the day, what’s left appears to be something true, something fundamental to being a person.

• You lot don’t need me. And that’s fine. I don’t want to be needed. I just want to leave with dignity.

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Author: Ben Reeves
Publication date: 7 July 2026
Number of pages: 256 pages

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